Sony applauds 'experiment' to build AOSP for Xperia S

When Google's Jean-Baptiste Queru announced plans for an "experiment" that would make the Sony Xperia S a "target" for the Android Open Source Project, nerds and neckbeards got all flustered over the prospect of a non-Nexus device seeing some official AOSP love. It would be "a new challenge," Queru wrote in the Android Building group, later noting that "the potential end result that could be visible would be upgrades arriving very slightly earlier for Sony devices." And who wouldn't want that?

The other side of the equation here is Sony. (Or Sony Mobile, to be precise.) How's the manufacturer feel about all this mucking about with its hardware? They're all for it, a company spokesman told Android Central today.

"Sony Mobile encourages and supports external innovation and the openness that Android brings," Sony told us in an official statement. "Our Developer World team have supported community driven Android projects for a long time

"It is now great to see that representatives from started this project, which aims at putting latest Vanilla Android on Xperia S, thanks to our unlockbootloader service. It is great to see that the project already received support from community of Android developers who can contribute to the project Google opened up. This project is driven outside Sony Mobile, however we will of course follow the progress and see if there are things we can contribute with along the way."

That shouldn't come as a surprise. Queru in an April Google+ post gave kudos to the code that Sony's been providing back to the AOSP in the first place, noting that it's made things easier for the company in the long run. And, indeed, Sony's on a bit of a tear when it comes to updating its devices.

Said Queru: "Since Sony has been contributing a lot to the Android Open Source Project, they have fewer changes that they need to maintain on their own: those changes of theirs are already there when the source code is first released."

And that, ladies and germs, is what this open-source thing is all about.